1. Technical Field
The present invention relates, generally, to resource provisioning management (RPM) systems. More specifically, the present invention relates to a method, system and computer program product for managing automated RPM systems.
2. Description of Related Art
In the business environment today, businesses must collect and efficiently use large amounts of data. This has led to the development of data centers. Data centers have evolved greatly over the last few years. They have been growing in size and gaining importance in the business environment. With this growth, information technology (IT) organizations are managing a complex mix of vendors, hardware, software, operating systems, configurations, and patches. As a result, keeping pace with configuration changes while minimizing system downtime and maximizing staff productivity is increasingly difficult. The burden on an IT organization and its personnel to manually administer these resources is typically dependent on the size of the organization (the number of users) and the rate at which users join or leave the organization or otherwise change roles. To improve efficiency and reduce the burden on the IT organization and its personnel, some organizations have used software applications which automate or partially automate some of the tasks.
The software applications which automate or partially automate some of the tasks relating to provisioning certain, limited types of resources to users are operable on a communication network for provisioning users with resources according to established criteria. Systems employing such software applications will be generally referred to herein as RPM systems.
However, the problem of provisioning is only partly solved by employing an automated resource provisioning tool which helps IT administrators by relieving them from manually making the required changes and updates needed to maintain the data centers. With the unprecedented growth in datacenter operations, the number of different target end points managed by a datacenter is increasing. The number of different automated provisioning operations resulting from different hardware and software configurations is also increasing. This increase has created an additional need for IT administrators to efficiently manage these end points and provisioning operations in order to effectively improve the services they provide and lower the costs within an increasingly complex computing environment. Therefore, it would be advantageous to provide a method, system, and computer program product for managing automated RPM systems.